Muslims, believing their Islam to be above criticism, responded with death threats by email, phone, and on the Internet. An online Islamist Web site known as Al Hesbah, affiliated with Al Qaeda, published photos of Redeker, his cellphone number, his home address, directions to his home. Egypt and Tunisia banned that day's issue of Le Figaro. Al Jazeera Tv denounced him. Redeker described the kind of Muslim threats he received: "You will never feel secure on this earth. One billion, three hundred thousand Muslims are ready to kill you."

Redeker and his wife were forced into hiding by the violent Muslim intimidation. One of his three children was forced to move, another is safe in a boarding school. Said Redeker, "I can’t work, I can’t come and go and am obliged to hide. ... "So in some way, the Islamists have succeeded in punishing me on the territory of the republic as if I were guilty of a crime of opinion."

Le Figaro caved into the Muslim pressure immediately, as you might expect the French to do. Pierre Rousselin, the editor in chief of Le Figaro, made a craven apology to Muslims on Al-Jazeera TV for publishing the article, saying it was a mistake and did not express the paper's opinion. Redeker's op-ed was removed from the Figaro website.

Redeker's employer, the Ministry for National Education, abandoned him, too. Gilles de Robien, the education minister, declared "solidarity" with Redeker, but timidly retreated after that token lip service, saying that "a public employee should be prudent and moderate in all circumstances." Especially with Muslims.

The Islamists on the Al Hesbah website continue to spit threats at Redeker: "It is impossible that this day pass without the lions of France punishing him. ... May God send some lion to cut his head." The Muslim thugs of Al Hesbah want the "pig" Hedeker slaughtered like Muslim assassin Muhammad Bouyeri murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh after he made a film critical of Islam.

Here is the op-ed Redeker wrote that prompts the bloodthirsty Islamists to call for his murder:

"The reactions caused by Benedict XVI’s analysis of Islam and violence highlight the underhanded maneuver carried out by Islam to stifle what the West values more than anything, and which does not exist in any Moslem country: freedom of thought and expression.

Islam tries to impose its rules on Europe: opening of public swimming pools at certain hours reserved exclusively for women, ban on caricaturing this religion, demands for special diets for Muslim children in school cafeterias, struggle to impose the veil at school, accusations of Islamophobia against free spirits.

How can one explain the ban on the wearing thongs on Paris-Beaches (Paris-plages) this summer? The reasoning put forth was bizarre: women wearing thongs would risk “disturbing the peace”. Did this mean that bands of frustrated youths would become violent while being offended by displays of beauty? Or were the authorities scared of Islamist demonstrations by “virtue squads” near Paris-Beaches?

However, the authorization of the veil on the street is more disturbing to public peace than wearing a thong, because it invites complaints against the upholding the oppression of women .This ban represents an Islamization of sensibilities in France, a more or less conscious submission to the diktats of Islam. At the very least it is the result of the insidious Muslim pressure on the minds: even those who protested the introduction of a “Jean Paul II Square” in Paris would not be opposed to the construction of mosques. Islam is trying to force Europe to yield to its vision of humanity.

As in the past with Communism, the West finds itself under ideological watch. Islam presents itself, like defunct Communism, as an alternative to the Western world. In the way of Communism before it, Islam, to conquer spirits, plays on a sensitive string. It prides itself on a legitimacy which troubles Western conscience, which is attentive to others: it claims to be the voice of the oppressed of the planet. Yesterday, the voice of the poor supposedly came from Moscow, today it originates in Mecca! Again, today, western intellectuals incarnate the eye of the Koran, as they have incarnated the eye of Moscow. They now excommunicate people because of Islamophobia, as they did before because of anti-communism.

This opening to others, specific to the West, is a secularization of Christianity that can be summarized thus: the other person must come before me. The Westerner, heir to Christianity, is that who exposes his soul bare. He runs the risk of being seen as weak. With the same ardor as Communism, Islam treats generosity, broadmindedness, tolerance, gentleness, women’s liberty and freedom of manners, democratic values, as marks of decadence. They are weaknesses that it seeks to exploit, by means of useful idiots, self-righteous consciences drowning in nice feelings, in order to impose the Koranic order on the Western world itself.

The Koran is a book of unparalleled violence. Maxime Rodinson states, in Encyclopedia Universalis, some truths that in France are as significant as they are taboo. On one hand: “Mohammed revealed in Medina unsuspected qualities as political leader and military chief (…) He resorted to private war, by then a prevalent custom in Arabia (….) Mohammed soon sent small groups of partisans to attack the Meccan caravans, thus punishing his unbelieving compatriots and simultaneously acquiring the booty of a wealthy man.”

There is more: “Mohammed profited from this success by eradicating the Jewish tribe which resided in Medina, the Quarayza, whom he accused of suspect behavior.” And: “After the death of Khadija, he married a widow, a good housewife, called Sawda, and in addition to the little Aisha, barely ten years old. His erotic predilections, held in check for a long time, led him to ten simultaneous marriages.”

A merciless war chief, plunderer, slaughterer of Jews and a polygamist, such is the man revealed through the Koran.

Oh, the Catholic Church is not above reproach. Its history is strewn with dark pages, for which it has officially repented. The Inquisition, the hounding of witches, the execution of the philosophers Giordano Bruno and Vanini, those wrong-thinking Epicureans, in the 18th century the execution of the knight of La Barre for impiety, do not plead in the church’s favor. But what differentiates Christianity from Islam is obvious: it is always possible to go back to true evangelical values, the peaceful character of Jesus as opposed to the deviations of the Church.

None of the faults of the Church have their roots in the Gospel. Jesus is non-violent. Going back to Jesus is akin to forswear the excesses of the Church. Going back to Mahomet, to the contrary, reinforces hate and violence. Jesus is a master of love, Mahomet is a master of hatred.

The stoning of Satan, each year in Mecca, is not only an obsolete superstition. It not only sets the stage for a hysterical crowd flirting with barbarity. Its imports anthropological. Here is a rite, which each Muslim is invited to submit to, that emphasizes violence as a sacred duty in the very heart of the believer.

This stoning, accompanied each year by the accidental trampling to death of some of the believers, sometimes up to several hundreds, is a rite that feeds archaic violence.

Instead of getting rid of this archaic violence, and thus imitating Judaism and Christianity (Judaism starts when it abandons human sacrifice, and enters civilization; Christianity transforms sacrifice through the Eucharist), Islam builds a nest for this violence, where it will incubate. Whereas Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites spurn violence, by de-legitimizing it, Islam is a religion that exalts violence and hatred in its everyday rites and sacred book.

Hatred and violence dwell in the book with which every Muslim is brought up, the Koran. As in the Cold War, where violence and intimidation were the methods used by an ideology hell bent on hegemony, so today Islam tries to put its leaden mantel all over the world. Benedict XVI’s cruel experience is testimony to this. Nowadays, the West has to be called the “free world” in comparison to the Muslim world; likewise, the enemies of the “free world”, the zealous bureaucrats of the Koran’s vision, swarm in the very center of the free World."

Redeker was forced out of his house into hiding immediately after his op-ed hit the streets. Redeker wrote to a friend:

"I am now in a catastrophic personal situation. Several death threats have been sent to me, and I have been sentenced to death by an organizations of the al-Qaeda movement. [...] On the websites condemning me to death there is a map showing how to get to my house to kill me, they have my photo, the places where I work, the telephone numbers, and the death pronouncement. [...] There is no safe place for me, I have to beg, two evenings here, two evenings there. [...] I am under the constant protection of the police. I must cancel all scheduled conferences. And the authorities urge me to keep moving. [...] All costs are at my own expense, including those of rents a month or two ahead, the costs of moving twice, legal expenses, etc. It's quite sad. I exercised my constitutional rights, and I am punished for it, even in the territory of the Republic. This affair is also an attack against national sovereignty – foreign rules, decided by criminally minded fanatics, punish me for having exercised a constitutional right, and I am subjected, even in France, to great injury."

After a few weeks on the run, it hasn't gotten any better for Redeker:

"I don’t have the right to put my nose outside. And this continues for almost four weeks. The man, who was acknowledged to be the author of threats against me, has been set free, under legal control. And I, his victim, I live under conditions of quasi-detention. I don’t have the right to leave, I am not free to do anything, except sending e-mails and telephoning. I do not even have the right to open the shutters. And one of the culprits is given freedom; he has the rights of which I have been deprived. It’s horrible to live."

Saturday, November 11, 2006

The Thirty Year War

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, Director General of MI5, the British internal security service, gave a talk about terrorism to a group of East London academics called the Mile End Group:

“The threat is serious, growing and will, I believe, be with us for a generation. ... Today we see the use of home-made improvised explosive devices. Tomorrow’s threat may — and I suggest WILL — include the use of chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology. ... My officers and the police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1,600 identified individuals who are actively engaged in plotting or facilitating terrorist acts here and overseas. And there will be many we don’t know, too. ... More and more people are moving from passive sympathy towards active terrorism through being radicalised or indoctrinated by friends, families, in organised training events here and overseas, by images on TV, through internet chatrooms and websites. ... Chillingly, we see the results — young teenagers groomed to be suicide bombers. ... We are aware of numerous plots to kill people and damage our economy. What do I mean by numerous? Five? Ten? No, nearer 30 . . . that we know of. ... Killing oneself and others is an attractive option for some citizens. ... It is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalised and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow UK citizens — or their early death in a suicide attack or on a foreign battlefield. ... We are faced by difficult choices. We cannot focus on everything so we have to decide where to focus our energies, whom to follow, whose telephone lines need listening to. ... We shan’t always make the right choices. And we recognise we shall have scarce sympathy if we are unable to prevent one of our targets committing an atrocity. ... Chancellor Gordon Brown has poured in enough cash for MI5 to double in size over seven years. Even with such rapid growth we shall not be in a position to investigate nearly enough of the problem.”

The 2800 officers of MI5 have stopped six attacks by Islamic terrorists in the last six years but their caseload has ballooned by 80% since January. They are concentrating their investigations on the most dire threats while putting two hundred terror plots on the back burner.

Dame Manningham-Buller forecasts a thirty year campaign of Islamic terror against Britain: "It aims to wear down our will to resist. All of us, whatever our ethnicity and faith, are the targets of terrorists."

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Ramadan Trophies

Hasanuddin, a Javanese Muslim trader, was impressed after a visit with the Philippine Islamists of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front with how they planned bombings to celebrate the end of Ramadan. He brought the idea back to Poso in Central Sulawesi in Indonesia, where Muslims and Christians fought a murderous war in 2001 to 2002 that left one thousand dead via burnings, beheadings, and the usual atrocities common to jihad. While Muslims are a majority in Indonesia, the Muslim and Christian populations are roughly equal in Central Sulawesi. Hasanuddin discussed his Ramadan bombing plan with a local Muslim cleric, but soured on it.

After batting the idea around with his pals, Hasanuddin decided that beheading some Christians would count as an act of Muslim charity. So he gathered accomplices from the local Islamic school to find some Christians to decapitate for the Lebaran holiday which marks the end of Ramadan. He told his pal Lilik Purnomo, "It would be a great Lebaran trophy if we got a Christian. Go search for the best place for us to find one."

Purnomo found some easy Christian prey in the form of a group of six schoolgirls who cut across a cocoa plantation near Poso when they walked the six miles from their village to a private Christian school. They were conspicuous by their school uniforms. Hasanuddin, Purnomo, Irwanto Irano, and six other men prepared to ambush the girls. They gathered six machetes, black ski masks, two-way radios, and black plastic bags to hold the heads. They watched the ambush site.

A woman spotted them hiding off the road and scared them off, but they came back to try again. The night before the attack, Lilik joked to Hasanuddin, "I hope you are ready to receive your Lebaran gift."

Only four girls, not the expected six, showed up at 6:30 AM the morning of October 29, 2005: Yusriani Sampoe, 15 years old; Theresia Morangke, aged 16; Alvita Polio, 19; and Noviana Malewa, 15. They were all cousins. The Muslims sprang out from behind a stand of tall grass to ambush the girls. Within seconds they had struck off the heads of three of them.

Noviana fought the jihadis enough that her assassin could not get a clean swing at her. He struck her across the side of the face with his machete, wounding her badly but failing to kill her. She ran with blood gushing from a massive gash from cheek to neck. Recalled Noviana, "All I could do was pray to Jesus for his help." The beheaders could not catch her. "I was streaming with blood." She escaped into a ravine.

Lilik directed the attack by radio from a hill. He told his gang to move fast so that if the other two girls showed up they could cut their heads off, too. The Muslims harvested the girls heads, stuffed them in a backpack, and presented it to Hasanuddin.

Hasanuddin's gang dumped the headless bodies of the three girls, dressed in their brown school uniforms, next to a busy road. Theresia's head was left in a black plastic trash bag on the doorstep of a newly built church in the village of Kasiguncu. The militant Muslims of Central Sulawesi have been perpetrating a terror campaign against Christian churches and religious services. Theresia's head was probably used as a threat to the practice of Christianity.

Yusriani (nicknamed Yarni) and Alvita's heads were dumped at a police station in Lege. Hasanuddin left a note with their heads that read, "Wanted: 100 more Christian heads, teenaged or adult, male or female; blood shall be answered with blood, soul with soul, head with head."

A week after the beheadings, Ivon Maganti and Siti Nuraini were shot by masked men while they walked to a Girl Scout meeting. They were both 17-year-old Christian girls. Assassins dressed in black and riding motorbikes slashed another couple women the next Friday, the Muslim sabbath.

Verse of the Sword, Koran 9:5: "Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush."

The three girls' bodies were dressed in flowing white gowns, bouquets placed in their hands, and their heads re-attached. Apparently, they were photographed and displayed in the Indonesian media.

The pastor of the dead girls church claims that their deaths were not in vain, that they are martyrs who have brought unity to Christian churches in Poso, who encourage the Christians to be strong in their faith. Alfita wanted to become a pastor herself. She was due to graduate from high school in five months. Her friends sing her favorite hymn, a song they believe she sings in heaven.

Hasanuddin and two others have been arrested for the murders and are being tried. They have confessed. There is no reason not to confess. They are guaranteed paradise now. A death sentence will speed them to their reward.

Noviana was taken far from Poso and placed under round-the-clock guard of four policemen. Radical Muslims are searching for her to finish the job and eliminate her as a witness. Muslims have shot other witnesses of Muslim attacks in the past.

Noviana suffered a dislocated jaw in the machete attack and cannot chew well. There is nerve damage which causes sudden bouts of pain. She has to massage her face every day to stimulate nerve growth. A plastic surgeon helped minimize the scarring, which boosted her spirits. No woman wants her face disfigured. Every day she rubs skin salve on the scar and has infrared beam treatment. It's not clear if she has been told her cousins are dead.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

The Price

Greg Kehoe, a lawyer from Tampa, Florida, spent the last year training judges in Iraq and helping the investigation that led to Saddam Hussein's death sentence. He had done similar work in Yugoslavia but the scale of the carnage in Iraq astounded him:

"I obviously had spent five years at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague and I'd been in exhumations and, of course, I have dealt with large crime bases. I never saw anything like I saw in Iraq. Anything that was in Yugoslavia was child's play compared to Iraq. The bodies were everywhere. The bodies were EVERYWHERE. I was used to doing exhumations where we took soldiers out of the ground. I wasn't used to doing exhumations where we took women and children and little babies as young as 6 months of age that had been executed with a .22-caliber round to the back of the head. That's a whole different type of crime to me."

Kehoe worked closely with the judges who prosecuted Saddam:

"I was talking to some of the judges on the court. Think about the courage demonstrated to go out and in the midst of this insurgency to investigate these cases and move ahead and try this case. Let's be honest, they're not absolutely positive as to which way this is all going to go. But they're out there, they're sacrificing themselves to get this done. One of the judges over there, a very good friend of mine, his brother was executed during the course of my stay there. I went in and I talked to him; he was very upset, of course, going to the morgue and finding his brother bound and gagged with wire and garroted. He said, "I understand this is a terrible thing, this is what we have to go through because this is the price we have to pay for democracy." You know, I sat there and I said, "How many people that we live with here in America are willing to make that sacrifice, to pay that price?"

Monday, November 06, 2006

Saddam Sentenced To Hang

Saddam was sentenced to hang along with all his blood-soaked cronies, as seen in this LiveLeak video. They did not take it well, which only makes it better. Watching this, I see nothing but a bunch of belligerent punk gangsters.

Chief judge Raouf Abdul Rahman pronounced sentence, "The court has decided to sentence Saddam Hussein al-Majid to be hanged until he is dead for crimes against humanity." Saddam was not used to being on this end of a death sentence and thought he could argue with it. It's a shame Saddam can only be executed once.

It's also worth watching to see the infamous Ramsey Clark get his ass thrown out of court. Clark, the former attorney general under LBJ, has made a career of defending the biggest butchers in the world and sliming America. He's a darling of the American hard Left. You can't throw a big anti-war rally in Washington, DC without inviting Clark to wail about what a horrible country we are.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

The Sun Did It

Sir Nicholas Stern, head of Britain's Government Economics Service and adviser to the government on the economics of climate change and development, has produced, with great fanfare, the "Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change", 700 pages of scary global warming propaganda, complete with tables and charts to make it look authoritative. British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, declares the Stern Review "the final word" on why we must act now to contain the damage we humans are doing to Mother Earth.

Stern threatens that if we don't do what he says, bad things will happen. Very bad things. One hundred million people will be flooded out of their homes. A billion people will run out of water due to melting glaciers. Hundreds of millions of "climate refugees" will wander the Earth, looking for a habitable spot. Forty percent of the world's species will die out. Twenty percent of the world economy will be obliterated. However, we can avoid all this if we raise taxes now, a mere 1% of the world's gross domestic product. Of course, most of the world doesn't produce much of the world's GDP, so those higher taxes will fall on productive nations like the USA.

Unfortunately, the Stern Report has the ripe smell of a political position, not a well-reasoned position based on irrefutable facts. Bjon Lomborg, the Skeptical Environmentalist, takes apart the report in the Wall Street Journal. Lomborg finds the Stern Review has cherry-picked its facts to support its fear-mongering conclusions. For example, the previous figure for the environmental cost of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide into the air has been placed at $2.50, a figure that has been criticized as too high. Stern places the cost at $85.

In some cases, Stern doesn't understand what his numbers represent. Stern claims that the increasing damage from hurricanes in the US is evidence of the effect of global warming. Lomborg points out that there is more damage because there is more to damage. The population of the US has increased, increasing the population of people living in hurricane-prone areas, and exposing more property to harm.

Lomborg concludes that Stern's recommendations would harm, rather than help: "Given reasonable inputs, most cost-benefit models show that dramatic and early carbon reductions cost more than the good they do. Mr. Stern's attempt to challenge that understanding is based on a chain of unlikely assumptions." Lomborg believes that money spent to ward off global warming is a poor investment. We would reap a higher return on investment in better health, nutrition, water, sanitation, and education.

Hans H.J. Labohm points out in TCS Daily that Stern's fellow economists have strongly criticized his report, claiming his conclusions are far too confident and unqualified given the uncertainty of projecting climate change. For example, Stern projects dire results from the current decade of melting glaciers in Greenland. However, Greenland's glaciers also had a decade of warming in the 1920s. The European glaciers Stern cites as additional evidence began retreating long before carbon dioxide accumulated enough to warm them. The problem is that the models upon which global warming rests can not predict the current climate based on known data, let alone confidently predict the future climate. Simply put, science can not predict the weather two weeks from now, let alone a century from now.

Christopher Monckton writes in the Sunday Telegraph that "the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government"." Monckton points how the global warming doomsday cult of politicians, government bureaucrats, and politicized scientists have cooked the evidence to support their political agenda. In other words, they are creating a phony crisis to gain more power for themselves. For example, he shows how the UN rewrote the Medieval Warm Period, the global warming which came and went from 1100 to 1300 AD, out of history to build the famous "hockey stick" which the greenies use to "prove" that the current warming is caused by humans. As one global warming scientist emailed indiscreetly to a colleague: "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." The facts didn't fit their politics.

The current warming trend is probably due to the sun, not anything human. William Herschel, an astronomer, was reading Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" two centuries ago when he notice that the grain prices Smith cited fell when the number of sunspots rose. In other words, when the sun flares up, it warms the Earth, more grain grew, and the glut of grain depressed prices.

The last fifty years has seen a warmer sun than in the last 11,400 years, according to Sami Solanki, a solar physicist. That accounts for a quarter of the past century's warming. Feedback from the climate amplifies that warming.